Hillary Clinton’s Unlikely Favorite TV Show Revealed

In a New York Times op-ed about Hillary Clinton’s enduring coolness (and also what she plans to do after retiring as secretary as state), the former First Lady cemented a place in our hearts by calling out the president of Peru for hosting a dinner that ran too long, talking “without any great enthusiasm” about the chance that she might run for president in 2016, and revealing her unlikely favorite television show. Can you guess the series that Hillary Clinton—the political figure so cool that she followed up an international summit earlier this year in Colombia with a spontaneous dancing excursion at a local bar—deems addictive? And the series that, by proxy, is (today, in this blogger’s cubicle, at least) the coolest show on television?

The series is Love It or List It, a Canadian home-improvement reality series that’s broadcast in the U.S on HGTV. Each episode features a couple who, dissatisfied with their current residence, shops for new homes while a designer makes over their current one. At the end of each episode, the couple has to decide to keep the made-over house or to kick it to the curb for their new dream home. (Psychologists might infer some significance to Clinton’s choice of television show and its parallels to a decision she may have had to make about her marriage in the mid-90s. But since we are bloggers and not mental-health professionals, we will simply Tivo the series this week and imagine that we are watching it with Hillary.)

On Monday, a full two days after Clinton bolstered her street cred with this humanizing admission, we are disturbed to find that HGTV has not introduced a new Love It or List It ad pull-quoting the secretary of state. (“I find it very calming” —Hillary Clinton.) We just hope that network employees are simply distracted by their efforts to stunt-cast Clinton in the wake of this revelation. Something tells me that HGTV might have a better chance of recruiting her than Jason Segel did earlier this year, when he invited her to do a How I Met Your Mother cameo. After all, cable is so much cooler than network television.